


you could have been angels

by radishface



Series: Deepfakes [3]
Category: X1 (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 22:04:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21215789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radishface/pseuds/radishface
Summary: You hadn’t seen Kim Wooseok in forever. He barely got the keys into the front door when you put both palms to his face and kissed him. The words that echoed in your head for the rest of the night were his:look at me and don’t let go.Then, without explanation, he stopped returning your calls.





	you could have been angels

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Enigma Variations](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/531116) by André Aciman. 

You hadn’t seen Kim Wooseok in forever.

It was at a Rodeo restaurant that belonged to one of your old label mates that you two finally bumped into one another. In the VIP room you could only access around the side of the building, you were the two odd ones out in a room full of girlfriends and maybe- or maybe-not girlfriends. It was only a matter of time before you found each other.

You joked a bit about yourselves. Got through military service in one piece? Still unattached? Still damaged? Maybe. Did you expect to see me? You wouldn’t admit it then, and fobbed his question off with a joke, but you hadn’t had any plans that Friday. Maybe you’d been hoping that he’d be here.

And now you were finally enjoying each other’s company in a way that made you want to stick around. So you did, until the party finally tapered off around two in the morning. Wooseok lived six or seven blocks away. You both emerged from the restaurant into the crisp autumn night and walked him down the hill, across the main street, and into the residential area murked in shadows. Wooseok delivered his first real barb of the evening—he couldn’t believe you’d stayed so long, given your age. When you asked why he had stayed, he said, duh, for the same reason you had. And if you were wondering if you could come upstairs, then the answer was yes.

He barely got the keys into the front door when you put both palms to his face and kissed him. It reminded you of another time, another doorway, another aching walk to nowhere and forever. You had forgotten the feel of his mouth, of his tongue, of your tongue against his. Small, taut lips, their surly upward curve, back then they had always suggested superiority, holier-than-thouness, and now you knew them, again.

You kissed him and undressed by the couch by the bay windows facing the river; he poured soju into two glass tumblrs that had once belonged to Jinhyuk. There was a large white dehumidifier stationed next to the window, humming away like it was trying to ignore you. The way the vents batted back and forth shyly it was as if it had never seen two men tear off each other’s clothes.

“Nice apartment,” you said, trying to lighten the mood.

Wooseok took your chin. “Look at me and don’t let go.” He gasped those words with the bruised sensuality of a dove that wanted nothing more than to have its crown smoothed in gentle, reassuring motions. Look at me when you come, I want to see it in your eyes, he said or you said, but the words that echoed in your head for the rest of the night were _don’t let go_.

So you didn’t.

“We were never like this back then,” you said afterwards. It had been fun, flirtatious, coy, and disingenuous. Why had you been so scared to go deep? Your ugly desperation and his fear; it’d all been buttoned up under a veneer of cool, career, and cute.

“We were young,” Wooseok said, as if that explained it all. You watched him shrug, the way his pectorals peeled into his biceps, the fine, slender body he still maintained. “Besides,” he said, and slipped on his glasses and made his way into the kitchen.

“Besides?” You followed gamely behind, used to this push and pull, relieved that your feet took you and that your pride wasn’t so overgrown that you couldn’t follow when beckoned.

“Besides,” Wooseok repeated, taking his sweet time to pour a tall glass of water, drinking it as he appraised you, pathetic you, standing there buck naked, and his lip curled again in that supercilious way that used to drive you mad. Even now it made you twitch—yes, look at me, I’m pathetic, tell me I’m pathetic, raise those words to me, push my buttons where I’ll flinch the most. “This time, it was written all over you.”

You always thought your ambitions and desires had been written all over you, but it had taken you a while to realize that for all your outspoken, brazen behavior, you had been wounded enough in early life to learn how to keep your cards close, and that only a few people knew how to look past them—namely, those who had been wounded themselves. This was what you remembered about Wooseok—that he knew your thoughts before you had even thought them. You liked his barbs that poked and that he didn’t mince words, that he always aimed straight for the bashful little truth he saw you hide and knew exactly where to find it even when you claimed you couldn’t remember.

“I was crazy about you back then, you know.”

“I know,” Wooseok narrowed his eyes.

That night the dream of something long given up was, like a message in a bottle, finally delivered to the right beach after bouncing from shore to shore. You had a makeshift breakfast of old toast and ham that was just a bit off, made love again, and then without showering because who cared about two old idols whose best days were behind them? You spent two nights together, sex fueled by cheap coffee and pastries from the local bakery, Wooseok even skipping his gym routine—oh precious gym routine—to make love to you. You had dinner on Sunday night at an upscale izakaya restaurant around the corner where the waiter knew Wooseok and you both and gave you second helpings of awamori on the house. You held his hand under the table and murmured that this was worth the wait.

Yes it was, Wooseok said, hand warm in yours.

Then, without explanation, he stopped returning your calls.

.•º

“I moved on,” he said when you met two years later at the same restaurant in Gangnam where you’d both once again drifted for nothing better to do that night. Things turned sour, and he didn’t want that baggage with you, didn’t want the regret, the days gone bad like rancid trash, where you’d get hot and he’d get cold.

So did that one Friday mean anything at all?

“That was meant to happen. It was supposed to happen since we were on that show, if you care to know.”

Somehow with these words he’d melted your heart all over again. You were an idiot for being so soft, or maybe you were an idiot for never realizing: you had no idea it’d gone that deep, that far back with him. Wooseok, buried deep in mystery and what he looked like when he was holding back the words on his mind, always could surprise you. Like plumes of carbon dioxide from deep within the Mariana Trench, barely bubbles by the time they reached the surface, undetectable save for those who knew what to look for.

“I wish I’d known,” you said.

Callous, like a cat with an old piece of yarn who couldn’t be bothered, “Well, now you do. Besides, I wasn’t going to stick around while you got moody and started to second-guess yourself.”

You balked.

“I could see it on your face that Sunday. You always get mopey. And you had so many other things you wanted to do besides stick around with me. I’m sure there was a part of you that wasn’t sorry at all.”

“That’s not,” you start, but Wooseok interrupts you.

“I wouldn’t have been enough for you, anyway. Or what you expected. You’re always onto the next thing, something more. That’s just you. Bouncing from one thing to the other.”

“Maybe Friday _was_ a mistake,” you said. You wanted to shut this conversation down. Or just get a reaction.

“It wasn’t,” Wooseok wasn’t shaken at all. You admired him his steeliness.

“So what was it, then?”

“Old friends catching up.”

“We didn’t talk much, though?”

His lip turned at your crudeness. “Maybe that’s why we chickened out.”

“_We?_”

“Okay, me.” At least he had the decency to acquiesce. He avoided looking at you, and things went silent. Beyond the bubble of your conversation-not-conversation, blues played, and there people chatted at the next table: two fresh-faced models, upcoming industry darlings.

You tell him you remember one specific night.

“Which night?”

But you knew he remembered.

About two years into your promotions as a X1, he had tagged along with you to visit your mother in the hospital. Before the weekend was up she told you both to go have fun, told you take her volcanic black Jaguar out of the garage since she wouldn’t be able to drive it anyways. Wooseok cozied into the leather seats, looking every inch like this is what he was meant for: you, taking him out. So you did. You drove, without telling him the destination, all the way out past Incheon to Ganghwa island, where you parked the car in a parking lot somewhere and then took bikes out for the day, brisk wind in your faces as you rode through the fields and past the stone statues from prehistoric times, as you hiked up to the top of the mountain and tried to make out glimpses of the Northern border. You ate yourself silly, ravenously, on _gamjatang_, your shaky, glucose-deprived fingers shaking as you sucked the meat and cartilage off gamey bones and his too when he offered them to you, your mouth smeared with chili oil and when you looked up, the tenderest expression on his face as he handed you a napkin.

After the restaurant you both walked back to the car, pressed into each other as children to a furnace after a day out in the snow, the longest walk to a car of your life because you kept bumping into him, knocking him off course, stopping him mid-stride to tell him another joke, another story, wrapping your arms around him to mock him for his smallness, his preciousness. You had been with so many people, you had so many friends, and yet all of them were touch-and-go compared to Kim Wooseok. Maybe you’d said something then because his arms finally came up to wrap themselves around you, and that’s when you leaned back and tilted his chin up and in a shaky breath asked if you could kiss him and without waiting for his reply did it anyway. He sighed in abandon, eyes rolling shut and you took even longer to get back to the car, once finally there, you pushed him back into the seats, a little rough.

You unzipped his puffer and pulled the car door shut behind you with your foot so you could get in on top of him. You were putting your hands up his sweater when without warning, something changed. Maybe it was because your hands were cold or maybe because the light of the street lamp flickered off, or maybe it was your breath and the garlic from the _gamjatang_, but you could tell Wooseok was tensing up. Then he said, “maybe it’s better if we just go back, it’s getting late”—as if what you were about to do would take you too far into the night and someplace from which you could never return.

You laughed and acknowledged that he was right, as usual, got out of the backseat and into the driver’s seat, Wooseok to the passenger’s seat. You turned the key in the ignition and the Jaguar chugged to life. The music switched on automatically as you peeled out of the gravel-strewn carpark and onto the expressway.

The next morning, you told him you loved him and he said he loved you, but then after that you were strangers. For those who knew how to look and what to look for it might have seem you were both distracted, but then after that it was back to your usual banter and back-and-forth, and somewhere deep in your mind you were relieved even though you still didn’t understand what could have changed his mind so abruptly.

“You were so mopey back then,” Wooseok said now.

You couldn’t remember being mopey, but maybe he knew something you didn’t, remembered something you didn’t. Either way, you didn’t mind being taunted. You’d been around long enough on this planet that your fears and your hurdles had come down. You didn’t tell Wooseok that it had taken you almost six months to get over your two-night stint of two years earlier.

You exchanged email addresses. (“You still change yours once a year, don’t you?”) His was still the same. Both of you were aware that the possibility of writing one another was paper-thin, but it was something to do as the party wrapped up and the constituents divided themselves into old people who would return home and youngsters who would continue the party out elsewhere.

You ended up taking him home. Same eight or nine blocks from the party, same elevator ride up twenty five floors, same door opening to the same bay window view and same dehumidifier waving its vents at you, slowly, hello, old friend.

You shrugged off your jacket and hung it over the chair at his kitchen table and looked out at the view. Tonight on the Han there were no boats, only reflections of lights. The rest of it, an inky darkness that stretched on for miles. Up here, there was no delineation, no boundary. Only blackness punctuated with lights.

“Stay,” Wooseok said. He made love the same way.

_I had hope that you’d be there at the party. I hoped you would stay late talking to me. I didn’t want it to show. Hold me. Look at me. Don’t let me go. Don’t say anything._

You let yourself drift, just like you did last time. You were his to be picked up and tossed away and do whatever he wanted with.

_I love the way you touch me,_ he said. _I love the way you feel_.

He wanted this every morning and every night forever and ever. You loved that you turned him into this when you made love. You loved that it made you speak like this, too.

_It’s always been you_, Wooseok said, baptized on the kitchen table.

After sex, you said “this is destiny.”

“Don’t overdo it,” Wooseok said. “It was nice.”

“Nice,” you say, a tiny piece chipped from your heart. “You haven’t changed.”

“Neither have you.”

“Really?”

“Pretty sure.”

“But I’ve been through a lot since last time.” You snuggled into Wooseok’s side and he draped one languid arm over you.

“When have you not been through a lot?” And then, as if acquiescing, he said, “so have I.”

Did that mean Wooseok was less likely to run away this time?

“Stop with the questions,” he said. He had a boyfriend, he said.

Serious?

Serious enough.

What did that leave you with? There was no “us.”

You made a show of getting dressed, but he repeated, stay the night, and you did. In the morning you ate breakfast naked, you feeling unfair that if Wooseok’s beau was to walk in through the door this would be hard to explain, and he asked you if you were seeing anyone, to which you said no one, you’d found no one, and he downplayed the boyfriend. Plus, nobody touches me like you do. Seeing you get hard as you tried to hide it with a piece of toast, he batted it away and lowered himself down on your lap, facing you, his bare thighs straddling yours.

You make me like me, Wooseok said. Doesn’t your boyfriend? Not like this. Not like this, scared, careless, reckless us. His lips were dark, bruise-colored, his eyes boring into you and it made you want to rip yourself open with the kitchen knife and lay your heart before him so you could see how it wobbled and jiggled and leapt when he spoke like this to you.

The meter was running. You were both naked and he grabbed your cock and slipped it inside him, don’t close your eyes, just look at me, I don’t care if it hurts.

“Don’t be mopey,” he commanded, as you got dressed. “Promise?”

“Promise,” you said, hugging him goodbye.

You waited for the elevator and realized nothing had changed. The years had passed here you were, feet cold in your Timberlands and shivering in your Gucci sweater. Despite what you had learned since, you were no stronger than on that cold night in November two years into your X1 contract nor any of the subsequent nights after, where you’d stay up dancing and writing songs and mugging at one another, _practicing._ And what had you been practicing for? To create some castle in the sky?

You didn’t see each other after that weekend. But you volleyed emails back and forth, incessant and intense. You played it as cool as you could, waiting days in between, and sometimes you could help yourself and sometimes you couldn’t. Rent-a-friend, you called yourself. Not in the least, he said. But on email you were fevered. As soon as you saw a message from him you’d be able to think of nothing else for the rest of the day. Every sentence was a gasp for breath. You read them in the morning, when waiting in line, in the evening, your dick went hard at inopportune moments, waiting in line, in cabs, in meetings under tables, but you relished it all, all of the quivering bliss his words erupted in you. _Look at me when you come_. You wanted to scream that nothing meant more than that. _You, more than any other man I’ve known._

“You’re my world,” you wrote to him once.

“Duh,” he wrote back.

“How can you be so certain?”

“Would you write like this if I weren’t?”

You told him how hard it made you when you remembered the way he’d lowered himself down on you in the kitchen.

“I can’t keep carrying on with you,” he said. “It’s ruining my life.”

_So what?_ You thought. You wanted to ruin his life. You wanted it in despair, damaged beyond repair. So he resented when you crossed the line and affected his private life, did he? You resented that he didn’t hold back spilling into yours. Rent-a-friend.

“I’m being nice today,” he’d write. No, never mind, you didn’t like his aloofness. It killed your vibe.

Bruises everywhere when you made up over email weeks later. Humor, sarcasm, jokes, halfway house apologies, but the flame was dying. How had you been riding on empty this whole time?

“This should have stopped weeks ago,” Wooseok wrote.

“Shouldn’t have started,” you snapped, fingers quick over your screen.

“Never stood a chance.”

“Nope,” you shot back.

Both of you, ripped up by kitchen knife daggers, talked serrated now. You stopped writing. Let it go.  
  
  


.•º

  
  
  
“I knew you’d be here,” Wooseok said two years later at a book party in Hongdae. He looked guarded, shoulders slumped underneath the big, clavicle-baring sweaters he loved this time of year.

“Where’s the boyfriend?”

Wooseok pointed to a man behind the table with the sign over his head, signing books. The boyfriend looked more like a mid-century film star than a writer, delivering autographs with a flourish and a beaming smile.

“How dashing,” you said. “Not mopey at all.”

“Staying until the end?” Wooseok hid a reluctant smile behind a glass of champagne. You pretended not to notice. It was a cocktail kind of affair in the bookstore. There were a few famous faces.

“He any good?” Yes, it was a double entendre. Yes, you were ignoring his question.

“Good writer?” Wooseok arched a brow. “Well, seriously speaking, just between us,” and he trailed off.

That sealed it. Wooseok was in top form tonight, sparkling and more catty than ever, and you loved it. You asked if that small place across from his apartment was still there.

“Oh, the Japanese place?”

“Yes.”

“Rintaro?”

You pretended to forget the name. “I think so,” you trailed off.

Wooseok wasn’t living there anymore. He had moved out west. A few blocks from this bookstore.

“It’s warmer over here,” he explained.

What was there to eat around here?

“Oily food,” Wooseok said, and his answer warmed your heart, because once again you knew he hadn’t forgotten who you were, what kind of food you liked.

Was this your way of asking him out for dinner?

If he was free, then yes. If not, just a passing curiosity.

“Stay,” Wooseok said, and waltzed over to another attendee, an ex-model turned DJ with a mole on his chin.

No, you hadn’t changed. Wooseok wasn’t living with the writer boyfriend, either. He still had his own place, his own furniture. Same couch. Same tumblrs. Same brand of soju.

What happened the last few years? Any one die? No, Wooseok said, and also, how macabre. Where was the fan? The big black one in front of the window? Donated when he moved. And so on. What was the latest boyfriend like? Not mopey, he said. You haven’t changed, you smirked. You haven’t either, he said. I don’t mean the way you look, you said. But that, too.

You trailed off because you were too happy to continue. The way Wooseok looked, sparkling, a little older, a wrinkle under his eye like a dimple, not there before, glass of soju dangling from his fingertips, one push and it’d drop on the floor, shattered, was shy and inviting.

You thrilled in kissing him without waiting for the right moment. What else was there to talk about? If I have to wait two years again, I might never make it.

You were talking. Shut up and look at me, Wooseok breathed.

Two days of bliss. Then arguments.

You wanted to attend a show, he wanted to stay in. You were going stir crazy, barely clothed, heat blasting through the central airways in the winter, couldn’t he have picked a bigger place? You would open the window for fresh air and he’d close it in a heartbeat. You could go to your apartment, you implored. It was at least twice as big and you had a piano. Didn’t he want to play music, sing, dance? Let’s invite people over, let’s invite everyone we know. You were restless as a fish out of water. He was content just to stare out the window and ignore text messages from his boyfriend. _Let’s get out of here._

_You get out of here_, he snipped, and let you get dressed, let you walk out the door, let you get in the elevator and curse your way down to the lobby and out into the cold.

You later learned from a friend that Wooseok had gone to the same show a day later, and that after that he’d gone with a big group to sing and dance and that he’d been quick-witted and cutting and acerbic. You hummed and nodded along as your left hand picked a receipt to shreds in your pocket. That week, you nearly blew out your back at the gym at half past two in the morning.

You apologized via email a week later, Wooseok said he was sorry too, and you didn’t read his hasty explanations and were sure that he didn’t read yours either. Let it go. It was something you were good at by now.

When you spoke again two years later, neither of you could remember what it was that had you both in such a snit. “Something dumb,” you said. “Absolutely juvenile,” he echoed. You were both just complete idiots. Why hadn’t he come after you? Why hadn’t you stayed? “What an impasse,” he murmured, and sipped appreciatively at his aperitif. It was a granache from Sicily. When did you develop these tastes, you asked. Oh, my partner and I went to Italy a few years ago, he said. Partner, you repeated dumbly. What, right after The Fight? Right after the fight, he echoed, neither yes or no. You shook your head in disbelief and drummed your feet against the floor until Wooseok shot you a look that said _behave_.

The next step was to introduce you to the partner. Wooseok took your hand and navigated you through the thick of the crowd into another room. It was the man from the bookstore, the one with the mid-century movie star smile. Shaking his hand now, you realized his face reminded you of someone, but you couldn’t quite place it. You were sure your face was pinched all night from the effort of trying to remember.

“Are you with anyone?” Wooseok cozied up next to you, under the pretense of making way for another pair of partygoers headed for the dance floor.

Yes, you’d brought someone.

“Tell me about her.”

Not much to say. Joo was a designer. She had studied abroad, won a CFDA award, you’d connected at an industry event because you were the only one who spoke English to her. Turns out she moonlighted as a DJ, _who didn’t these days,_ and you both hit it off. You produced a few tracks with her, she designed a few pieces for you, then one thing led to another.

“Good kisser?”

Like that mattered.

“Just kidding,” Wooseok pouted, sniffing at the rim of his granache. “So, are you going to get married?”

Nope, you said. You’re the only one for me.

“Please.” Spots of color bloomed high on his cheeks as Wooseok clenched his jaw. “You’re so full of it.”

So stay with me this time, you said. If I’m really the full package.”

Full of _it_, Wooseok repeated. And in the formal silence that ensued, both of you burst out laughing because it was obvious that you’d been keeping tabs on one another: him on Joo and you on the writerly _partner_, here and there. And that maybe things weren’t so bad between you two after all after the way you’d left each other last time.

“I knew you’d be here,” Wooseok said.

“Oh?”

“I told the host to invite you.”

Said host lived in an apartment with a terrace that overlooked the glittering length of the Han River into the lavender sky. “Tell me about married life and make a good man of me,” you said, perching yourself on the edge of a high top, fingers curled up cute against your cheeks. You were getting too old for this _aegyo_ shit but puffed out your cheeks anyway. Wooseok bit, poking your cheeks until you blew raspberries.

“Married life is ordinary,” Wooseok said. “We sleep in. Fold laundry. Walk the dog.”

“A dog?” This was new news.

“Yes.”

“A Shiba,” you guessed.

“A golden retriever,” Wooseok corrected. “He’s,” _basically you except has fur_, maybe Wooseok was going to say. “Insufferably depressive when he’s alone. Clingy as hell when I’m around. Prances.”

“Your partner, or the dog?”

“Somehow, all of you find me.”

“But I’m different. I was _always_ mopey.” You want to extract yourself from _the lot_.

“All of you find me,” Wooseok repeats. “And it hasn’t been all easy. Especially these last few years.”

You hadn’t asked, but Wooseok was jittering, on the edge of his seat. Your tongue felt big in your throat and you masked it with a sip of wine and threw out an encouraging, _so_?

“So I’ll tell you, because you’re the only person who’d fucking understand, but I’ve never been in love with him. Not once.”

“Sounds like marriage to me,” you quipped, keeping it light. You didn’t know if you wanted to hear any more. If you should be hearing any more. You didn’t want Wooseok interrogating you back, thinking he was entitled to probe into particulars.

“Jerk,” Wooseok snapped. “I’m telling you this because you and I are. We’ll love each other until forever, until we rot away and our teeth and hair and nails fall out and we die. But we can’t even get along for a weekend.”

Why is he telling you this?

“Don’t pretend like you have no idea. I’m always thinking of you. Maybe that’s why I had you invited. I wanted to see you. And you know as well as I do that there’s nothing we can do about it. So don’t you dare think you’re any different from me. With or without _your_ Joo.”

He leaned back so far in his chair he almost fell over, but still managed to level you with ice in his eyes. Like this, you felt like the scum of the earth, not the love of his life. Maybe the two were the same.

“This is Minho, my partner,” he said.

“Husband,” the partner corrected, and you shook hands. “I’ve read your book,” you said.

“So what did you think?”

“Just brilliant!”

More chit chat.

The sky was hazy purple with the light reflected against the clouds when the party ended and everyone else left but the four of you. You thanked the host and then on impulse decided to have dinner together. No reservations, but after a few dashed phone calls Joo found a table at a small place in Bontasang, Italian, civilized enough. You hailed a cab, the husband chivalrous in taking the front seat while the three of you snuggled tightly in the back, you cramped in the middle. Like this, you could hold both their hands. Neither of them might care as long as you didn’t let go. Wooseok must have sensed your intent, because he lay his hand turned up on his lap, docile as a resting dove. You pressed your hand into his briefly, and he left his palm there. It wasn’t just friendly only. So you reached out again and slipped your fingers into his. Joo’s face wasn’t moving at all which meant she had seen it and was playing it cool. You reached out for her hand too and she let you, no harm done. She let you. Humoring you and your fancies.

As soon as you were seated in the restaurant you ordered a bottle of red wine and a cheese platter. The waiter brought out bread and butter. Wooseok smiled under his breath now, _you know they live off this stuff in Italy? Nobody eats any vegetables_. That’s an exaggeration, the partner said, and then you complained about the weather. Summer plans? They were planning a trip to Greece. Minho wants to see the ruins. Wooseok the beaches. They weren’t going to spend much time in the tourist traps. No Santorini, no Mykonos, no Chinese on cruise ships. Everywhere, the partner said. Just like the Koreans, you said. Party laughs. There was a seahorse-shaped island called _Amorgos_ in the middle of nowhere, known for its liquor and the fact that the mid-century French director Jean Cocteau had shot _The Big Blue,_ had you seen it before? No, you shook your head, I’m just an unworldly lout. They liked to play cards. Boring, Wooseok said, our lives our immeasurably boring. “It never would have occurred to me back when we were in the band together that all those nights spent practicing and dancing and promoting that I’d somehow become this terribly dull person.” He was picking apart the crust on his bread, little delicate, unconscious motions.

“Oh, is that how you two know each other?” his husband interrupted. Feigning ignorance. It was his way of breaking the melancholy that had descended the table and also deflecting the weight of the history between you two—oh, is that it? that’s how you know each other? As if that were that. Or maybe Wooseok had just never mentioned you.

“We meet every other year,” you said. “Can’t stand each other,” Wooseok said at the same time. “We have dinner, argue, and then go our separate ways.” _Disappear_, you thought.

“They’ve known each other forever,” Joo said. She’d listened to your entire discography. She knew which songs were about Wooseok. You and Wooseok gave the short version of your X1 days. Husband finally placed you, ah that’s where I’ve seen your face before. You brought up the show. “Everything was root for a scandal, back in those days,” Wooseok started. “I’d just barely escaped career homicide by bad PR when I joined the group. It was my second chance.”

“You had to leave your other group behind?” Joo asked.

“They were fine without me,” Wooseok said, “but didn’t last for much longer. The right kind of training really matters. Five years in X1 and the very best I took with me was a love for the right kind of training.”

You laughed when you thought of the trainers. A few of them were still working, still in Seoul. They had talked about the trainers. Remember how they’d run you ragged? You’d never worked so hard in your life. What about when you were chasing me, Joo pouted. Sweetie, you said, and put a reassuring hand around her waist. _Up until then_, you clarified. Everything that happened in those long nights were magic. Magic nights, Wooseok agreed.

You each gave the short version of formative experiences in your early twenties. Husband and Joo had great memories—they’d both been abroad, husband at Princeton as a writer-in-residence, Joo at RCA in London. _Fancy_, Wooseok murmured, citing a hit song of the time. You knew the reference and gave him a knowing smile. You offered a pithy account of your time on the show laced with sentimentality about days gone by. Then, because Wooseok had brought up the show host, you ended up talking about him. Wooseok had seen Dongwook last year, who now had two children. That man, that magnificent man! “We’d sit cross-legged in the studio after the trainers ran us to bones, and then he’d pop in with an assistant each carrying two dozen boxes of fried chicken.” Lee Dongwook, he of magnanimous compassion and sad eyes whose expressions transitioned as beautifully between melancholy and true understanding as seamlessly as winter into spring, had been the best host the Produce franchise had ever had. “He was the kind of guy who would have been a picture-perfect professor of literature,” Wooseok sighed. “A thoroughly magical person,” you sighed. “Totally,” Wooseok agreed.

“I learned to love pauses from the rhythm of his voice,” you said. “Unforgettable voice when he read your name on stage. Five months in that program and what I took away was a love for my name—especially after a long pause.”

“Is that so,” Wooseok smiled slowly, taking his time tilt his head from one side to the other, “Cho Seungyoun?”

You knew that Wooseok would agree about the names. You had heard him say this years ago and was repeating it to him now, hoping it might draw you closer in case he forgot it was really his own observation. Him saying your name like this now made you feel close, chummy, unbearably entangled, happy. You wanted him to miss those days and never stop thinking, _Seungyoun thinks as I do, he’s never stopped loving me._

Then you told them about one night years and years ago when you’d finished practicing, and after passing the breaktime chicken wings greasy fingers to greasy fingers, how Dongwook had been watching the whole time from the shadows, commenting on how the concept challenge choreography had brought out the best in all of us. Did any of us know why? he had asked. No one knew why. It’s such an obvious answer, Lee Dongwook said. It’s because it’s been made for you, with you in mind.

Up to that point you had only been performing covers, so he _was_ right. This thing had been made with you in mind. The producers had been thinking through all of your strengths and weaknesses and your specialness when they put the choreography and tracks together.

“I had a part,” you said, “which required me to look a little bit menacing.”

“You did a great job,” Wooseok said.

“Wooseok was on a different team, but looked ten times more menacing than me.”

After your MOVE performance Wooseok had enveloped you in a sweat-stained hug. They’d put you in a Joy Division t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, so the sleeves of Wooseok’s shirt, a feathery grey organza, scratched at your bare arms. _Amazing,_ Wooseok had whispered in your ear, and in that moment with Wooseok’s arms around you and the crowd still screaming for an encore, you wondered if this was it, if this was the peak of life. Retelling this story to husband and Joo, you left out the part where Wooseok hugged you as though the world would come flying apart if he didn’t.

A few days later Lee Dongwook had come to visit you all again, bearing once more the gift of fried chicken, and sitting cross-legged on the studio floors he asked you all how many of you felt like you had experienced the sweetness of life.

Most raised their hands, thoroughly persuaded that in the few months they had been on the show that this was the pinnacle of experience. Only two didn’t raise their hands.

“Me and you,” Wooseok said, after a moment of silence, as if that said it all.

“Actually, a third hand didn’t go up that night,” you finally said.

“Whose?”

“Lee Dongwook’s.” Venerated actor, pick of the litter, cosmopolitan down to his very DNA, had not raised his hand. He was collecting the empty fried chicken boxes so as to not seem too obvious in abstaining from the count of hands. It struck you then, it made you think that he was living the wrong life, not his own. You saw a man crushed by one big, undying thrum of regrets. All the fame and glory, but none of its sweetness.

Suddenly, everything seemed lodged in the past, and you missed those days.

One moment with Lee Dongwook sat with you. It was before the finale of the show, when the final twenty of you would be cut down to eleven. After the filming of a filler reality segment, where the set was stylized as a campsite, after celebratory cake had been eaten, you and he had been standing off the side. You because you’d come back from the bathroom, him because he was there, in his trademark melancholy, unwilling to interrupt the end of the show. “I’m looking at all this,” he said in a quiet voice, as if you’d been standing there next to him all along, “and I’m thinking that one day I won’t be able to see it. I’ll miss it, even if I won’t have a heartbeat to miss anything. I will miss it for the days when, the way I miss memories from my childhood that I never had or all the places I could have called home but never did.”

“You’re a good bunch,” he told you after a long, deep breath, and you saw his eyes were rimmed red. You almost cried right there.

“So what happened to the rest of the group?” asked the husband, either out of curiosity or to sideline a conversation that was clearly not just about Lee Dongwook.

“A few went into modeling,” you said. “And a few others debuted later.”

“No regrets, then.”

It was a trite response, but you let the husband have the last word. He seemed to want it.

When you left the restaurant, you and Wooseok walked together, while Joo and the husband trailed behind. “Are you happy?” you asked. He shrugged, either to mean the question wasn’t worth asking or didn’t want to go there, or didn’t know what it meant. Happiness, _kore nan desu ka?_

How about you, though, he asked. His spontaneous _though_ told you he was expecting you to give a different response. But you shrugged too, so he wouldn’t feel lonely. “No regrets.” He smiled a little smile—you were making fun of his husband, and he didn’t mind. “With Joo there’s lots of fun, and we’re so busy working on our projects, and collaborating, but for the thing itself—“ you shook your head. _Nothing else to say._ “Can I call you?” Wooseok asked. He didn’t meet your eyes. “Yes.” You could hear the defeated, vanquished inflection in your voices. You regretted it as soon as you answered, and once again tried to inject the sparkling effervescence of your conversation at dinner. Perhaps you were trying to play it off. Maybe you were trying to convey how much you wanted him to call you. Wooseok put a hand on your arm as you neared the fork in the road where he’d turn right with husband and you’d turn left with Joo.

“This is unusual,” you said. “What’s unusual?” Joo asked. “Yes, very unusual,” Wooseok said. You didn’t bother to explain because you weren’t sure of what it was, yourself. You all shook hands. The husband's handshake was stern. You all promised to have dinner soon. “Yes, real soon.” You walked away. Joo tucked her arm into yours.

You shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold.

Wooseok called you not the following week or even the next month, but that night. Could you talk? Yes, of course. Your voice was bruised already.

“I wish it were you.”

What the hell did that mean?

“Exactly what you think it means.”

What?

“I told you already. I wish it were you _instead_.” Wooseok sounded angry at you—for not getting it right away, for making him say it. You were silent.

“Have I said something to upset you?”

Yes, he had.

Now it was his turn to be surprised. “Why?”

You didn’t know. Maybe because your heart was racing right now and it’d been so long. All those years, and it wouldn’t go away. Wooseok’s words about loving someone without being in love with him were coming back to you. You felt their lure. You loved Wooseok, loved the heartbreak and resentment, because you’d wasted so many years, because there was no love without desire, push-and-pull, small victories, vast, unending despair. The more you thought about it, the more it tore you up. “We’ve wasted so much time. Everything is wrong.”

“No. We were never wrong. We were right.” Unspoken, _the world was wrong._

The tears came to your eyes and the sobs to your throat and you bit down on your hand lest Joo hear you from the next room. “It’s been such a long time,” you fumbled over the tightness in your throat. _Since I cried, since we first met, since, forever._ In your muffled sobs you prayed that Wooseok knew more about you than you did about yourself. That Wooseok held the key to everything you felt and would feel. You didn’t need to know anything; Wooseok would be the one to know.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Wooseok’s voice came desperately, breaking the spell.

“So we’re just going to hide from each other for another four years until the next party, that it?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“Then why did you call me?”

“We were so close. And now we meet like this and say goodbye every time like this. What happens if one day—what if I die one day, and you won’t even know about it? And then what?”

That choked you. It took you a moment to recover.

“I can’t live with who I become each time we split. When this phone call ends.” You force a giggle into your voice, to lighten the mood. “Why am I crying now? I want to see you.”

“That’s why I called.”

You arranged to meet sometime the following week.

A few hours later, “Sorry, I can’t do it,” Wooseok texted when you sent him an email suggesting a time and place.

“Can’t do it next week,” you texted back, “or _ever?_”

He dropped off, three ellipses and then radio silence. You headed to bed with your phone never leaving you but even after you turned off the lights you couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning, trying to dampen your excitement and your anxiety with all kinds of mental tricks, meditating, counting, trying to play it down while you were playing it up and dreaming of what you'd say to yourself if Wooseok wrote back so you wouldn’t get hurt. Part of it was because you had thought of Joo, sleeping right there next to you. She reached out in the middle of the night to cuddle you or perhaps to still you your midnight vibrations and in her arms, you still thought of Wooseok.

You woke up and wasn’t sure if you were still dreaming, your life filled with these marginal moments, like beached whales waiting for the tide. Your life was filled with all these people on the fringe: Joo, Wooseok, the husband. But maybe that was wrong. Maybe it was _you_ who was on the margin. _You_ were on the outside. _You_ were on the outside, waiting for something to happen in the interior, the unfinished one.

You were the one who had never been born and yet who had already misspent his time.

The day went by. That night, with Joo’s body against yours, you dreamed you were holding Wooseok and pressed yourself against her. “Don’t stop,” she said, which is what woke you up and you continued So she wouldn’t know. She came and craned her neck around and kissed you.

Wooseok’s text buzzed you awake the next morning. _Ever!_

_.•º_

You spent all of Saturday in a stupor. Joo didn’t say anything. A lunchtime, in your studio, she brought you a ham and cheese sandwich. Did you want tea, or maybe a coke? A coke, you replied. A coke it is, she said, and slipped out of the room, shutting the door behind her without a sound. She knew.

She returned with a red can and popped it open with a hiss. Did you want to go out for a bit? You said you were fine. “Let’s go to the movies,” she said. “There are some good films out.” So you did, some brainless Hollywood superhero franchise, and it changed your mood. Afterwards, you took a walk around CoEx. There was a new art installation in the center of the mall, miles of papier-mâché flowers winding round and round the glass and steel and concrete, crawling up and down the shopping center. It was filled with people doing nothing, looking for a late bite, shopgirls and boys standing attentively outside luxury brand stores, welcoming tourists and locals alike. You didn’t want to bump into anyone you knew. You just knew if you stayed that you would bump into the two of them. Life worked that way. So you gulped down the rest of your movie slushee and said you were tired. You hopped on a bus home, sitting on the top row in the back of the bus.

A few years ago it had been Wooseok you’d wanted to go to the movies with. You had always wanted to be seen with him back then in your redux trainee days. Being seen with him meant so much to you. You had joked then. What now? Curfew was coming up. Let’s blow it off, you’d said. What to do? Wooseok asked. Let’s rent a hotel room. A late dinner, note, and sex. Champagne, too. Let’s not get carried away, Wooseok said.

Back then, you’d flirted, you’d flirted like crazy, and nothing had come of it. Nothing could come of it, so you wove elaborate stories Instead. All of them promises for how the future might one day be under the guise of flippant exaggeration today. Every joke a veiled intent. Now, you pass that very hotel you’d singled out with Joo’s hand tickled cozily in yours as you sit in the bus and you feel terrible again. Worse than feeling bad about how the day was, Wooseok’s text, _Ever!_, worse than hurting Joo.

You were disappointed in yourself. Because despite your desperate aching for Wooseok and dreaming about how he sat on your lap naked and looked you straight in the eyes and told you to never let him go, something blank and ugly had bubbled up in you when he sent you that text message: relief.

Relief that you didn’t have to go down that road of undying, infinite craving.

You wouldn’t have to plan anything. You wouldn’t have to test the passion, hide your hotel bills, make up excuses to cover up where you'd been that afternoon. The hotel, the champagne, the credit card statement, the being forced to explain, thank god. Maybe you never wanted to sleep with him after all.

It was all in the head.

Safer that way. And that’s where it would stay.

.•º

Months later you went to see a doctor after an intermittent pain shooting up your leg. You were sure it was a compressed spinal disc caused by sitting too much—you’d been working on a new album for an upcoming group, and the agency’s deadlines were impossible, but you were Cho Seungyoun and you had a reputation to maintain, genius to create. But after two visits you were told that perhaps a CAT scan was in order—just to make sure, the doctor clarified in that offhand, hurried manner that meant _no big deal_. “How much time?” You asked, but the doctor deflected.

Your mind was spinning out of control. If you had a tumor, you’d be dead before the year was out, and if you were dead, there would be nothing left. No second changes, no leap-year parties, all this waiting for the right time would have been for nothing. You would have died without living. No, not lived: waited.

Two weeks later the diagnosis was a compressed disc.

Part of you was convinced that your brush with death was a lesson. Time to act. Two hours after your diagnosis, you did something you’d never done before since the group split.

You called him. You rehearsed everything you were going to say. Coffee, just a late morning nip, Somewhere in Hapjeong, you knew a little place, he’d be back at work before he knew it, just in time for all the afternoon meetings he loved complaining about. And if he asked you why now, you’d say that something had almost happened but didn’t, and you wanted to tell him about it.

Instead, when Wooseok picked up at the first ring, the rush in his voice threw you off, he sounded busy, and what you ended up saying was that maybe you should call back another time.

“No. Tell me now.”

You liked that he wanted it now. “I just need to see you.”

“Where are you?”

“Walking.”

“Where?”

You gave him the name of the nearest subway station and the coffee shop you were standing in front of.

“I know it. Get the car _now_,” you heard him snipe at one of his assistants. “And stay where you are. Don’t move,” he barked.

Less than ten minutes later, Wooseok emerged from a black SUV.

“Coffee’s perfect,” he said. “I’ve been up since three in the morning. Got back from overseas just yesterday. Now what’s this all about?”

You entered Anthracite. A few students were studying in the lower floor. You ascended to the top floor and found a quiet corner bathed in glorious mid afternoon sunlight. The tables around you were all empty.

“I thought I only had two months left to live,” you said.

“And?”

“And nothing. False alarm. But I thought a lot about it.”

“I’m sure you did,” he said, trying to throw in his usual sarcasm. But it came out shaky.

“What I meant was, I thought of _you_.”

“Why?”

“Well, I was thinking, what would happen to you when I was gone.”

Wooseok hadn’t been expecting that at all. His chin quivered and his eyes glistened, rims turning red.

“What, if you die before me?”

You nodded.

“If you die, there’d be nothing left. But you knew that.”

“But so many years—we’ve never been there for each other.”

Wooseok waved it off. “You’re always there.” And a moment later: “so what about me?”

“You?”

“What if I die?”

“Same,” you said. “Just nothing.”

“Even though we never see each other?”

“Like you said, it doesn’t matter. And now we know.”

“Now we know.”

“So what now?” He seemed as helpless as you were. Neither of you looked at each other. You stared past his shoulder out at the garden; he past your shoulder to the brick wall behind you.

What had happened to you? Years ago you sat buck naked having breakfast, and in the middle of it all, you were hard and he lowered himself onto you and rode you till you both came. Nothing felt natural now. If you showed any passion, or tenderness, or let yourself go, he’d laugh you in the face. “I want to tell you something, but promise not to laugh.”

“I promise.” But his lips were already quirked up.

“I want to spend time with you away from everything and everyone. Let’s go away somewhere for a couple of days.”

When had you decided this?

Just now.

You wanted some imaginary champagne in a make-believe room far away from everyone and you wanted him there naked next to you reaching out to his champagne flute and suddenly crack it against the nightstand and with a shard held delicately between his fingers to make an incision ever so slowly on your left arm and with the palm of his hand rub your blood on the wound, on your face, on his body, and then beg you and beg you to do the same to him. This is what you had both come to. You loved with every organ but the heart, which is why you had stayed away from each other for so long. You couldn’t even find it in you to tell him how much you loved him, what scorched love you had for him. To get a reaction now blood had to be spilled. _Your fluids in my fluids, my muck yours and yours mine. Let the snake that bit you bite me, let it bite me on the lip. Die with me._

“I know why you called me,” he said.

“Tell me. I don’t know why.” You were being honest.

“You’re testing me. You want to see if I’ll give up everything to be with you. Either way I’m fucked. If I go with you, you’ll turn me down, saying you don’t want to ruin my life. If I say no, you’ll hold it against me forever. So for once in your fucking life, just tell me what you want me to do, because I’m totally clueless.”

“Just one weekend,” you finally said. Modest. Attainable. Humble, even. Maybe not even a weekend. What about a Monday and Tuesday? Mondays and Tuesdays, totally unremarkable, ordinary days.

Wooseok smiled, amused by the idea. But he wasn’t laughing. He was considering it.

“Where to?” But he didn’t wait for your answer. “Let’s go back.”

You knew exactly where he meant. “People can never go back.”

“We’re not people,” Wooseok said. “We’re out of this world.”

Over the coffee table in full view of anyone who would have been there you learned forward and kissed him on the mouth. With both hands, he cupped your face and kissed you back. It was high noon when you left the cafe. Neither of you said anything. You didn't care. The sound of your footsteps in the side streets crackled against gravel and were quiet, cat-like on the pavement. There were no shadows, only the brightness of the sun that baked the pavement to the color of paper. No one around, his hand found yours and yours found his. It was one of the most beautiful moments of your life.

What will you tell Joo?” he asked sincerely.

“Joo is Joo.” You thought about it a little longer. “She’s always known. And what about your man?”

“He thinks we’re still kids. He’s right. Whatever, he’ll live.”

You’d tell them the minimum. Just something about a talk that you had to give at a university up north. Wooseok had to meet a potential client outside Seoul who was homebound after an accident. And if they asked and asked, you’d tell them the truth.

The magic of the afternoon left you both feeling so happy that the next day, without planning it, you called him again. Same place, same time? Of course. You went to the cafe again and got the same thing. Cappuccino for him, pourover for you. You sipped in silence and thrilled as the caffeine kicked in, toes touching under the tables. Then the next day as well.

“Three days together. That’s gotta be a record,” you said.

Jerk, Wooseok said. He gripped your hand under the table and did not let go. You walked him back to his office.

“Did you tell Joo?” he asked.

“Not today, not yesterday.” You were thrilled that he asked. “What about you?”

“Nothing.”

“We could keep doing this.”

“New routines,” he said. Meaning, _yes, we could_.

“New routines,” you echoed.

  


.•º

  


Months later you arrived by train. The car would have taken two hours, and anything could have happened on the way to spoil the trip. The train was thirty minutes. While you were there, you did not speak about the trip, nor did you exchange more than small talk on the cab ride from the Paju train station to the hotel just outside of the Studio and training center. You wanted to neither express excitement nor apprehension. Two misspoken words even as a joke would have ruined the whole trip.

Now you were in the taxi you’d forgotten why you’d decided to come back. To run away from your lives and be alone together in a town where no one knew you or cared? To turn back the clock? To recover the other from a truer, more authentic part of your lives?

The closer you approached the Studio, the quieter you grew, each scared to trip the mood or wrong-foot each other, though equally downplaying the kitschy thrill of all trips. You wanted your arrival plain and ordinary. He kept looking out at the fields, while you looked at the pre-fab houses cropping up on the other side of the highway, both of you silent and partly oblivious, as though your return after so many decades were a mindless errand. For all the cabbie knew, you were just another pair of tight-lipped colleagues who were nervous for an upcoming meeting and couldn’t wait for the day to end.

You’d made a point of arriving early on a Monday. You wanted to be there just as the week started. You wanted to step back in time and walk down the same old paths on your way to the first training session of the day. You dropped your things off at the hotel and then walked around the neighborhood just outside the Studio before you mustered the courage to speak to the security guard in the parking lot. You were old assistants that had worked on the Produce projects and would it be possible to just have a look around for old time’s sake? Sure, he said. There wasn’t a session right now and the Studio was more or less deserted, go right on in. The 200,000 won you slipped him probably helped.

You walked around the Studio campus the way jaded, jet-lagged tourists do: without memory or anticipation. The statue of Pan in the roundabout had been replaced with a three-dimensional replica of Botticelli’s Aphrodite, (_atrocious_, Wooseok said) and there was a Starbucks where the old ramshackle bodega used to be. But these were muted moments. You took some pictures with your phones. Of him, of you, a selfie of the two of you. He texted it to you on the spot. Behind you rose the ubiquitous column of the main Studio. Up the steps, an entrance. An old banner from last season’s filming stretched across the top: welcome, trainees of the latest Produce class. Yes, this was real.

“You know they have boy and girl combo groups now?” you said.

“Atrocious,” Wooseok muttered again. But he looked happy. From the photos, you both did.

After an hour beating around the bush, you gave in. A back door to the Studio was propped open by a bag of trash, janitor asleep, and you both, stifling your giggles like schoolgirls, snuck in. The lobby had been redone up, tile replaced with marble and some kind of outsized Damien Hirst butterfly in the center foyer; the reception desk had switched sides and now there was a wall of clocks with different time zones hovering overhead. It looked like a news bureau. The staircases were in different places than they were before. It took you a moment to find the A and B ban rooms and even longer to find the larger practice studios. In that room you’d sat in large-arc semicircles and guzzled glucose packets and protein bars. The wood floors had been replaced in one of the rooms and when you switched on the lights, a neon Produce logo lit up on the other end of the room. The new setup made you feel like strangers who had time-traveled and landed in the future.

The cafeteria wasn’t open, but vending machines were. The tables and chairs had changed but the setup was still the same: rows and rows and food stalls against the wall. And the smell—you’d know it in an instant if they blindfolded you, spun you around, and dropped you in Brazil. Musty and sterile all at once, somehow human and still adorable. You got Wooseok a can of freeze-dried and flash-fried edamame peas and he got you a bottle of ice tea, handing it to you the way he once had while televised, arms stretched out taut and thin, head bowed. You unscrewed the cap with gusto.

“Don’t,” Wooseok said, but you had already splashed half the contents into your mouth and across your face. “Oh god,” he said, and pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe your face.

“Do you feel old?” you asked, letting him wipe your face dry.

“No. Should I?”

“I do.”

Leaving the cafeteria you finally did the unthinkable. You roped through the back and headed down the path to the dorms. There were new keycard security systems in place now so you couldn’t get into the building, so you stood in the courtyard and craned your heads to see one particular open window on the third floor.

After practice, you’d head back over together. Sometimes you’d drop him off, sometimes he would you. You both stood under the window not moving.

“In just a minute you’ll open the main door, walk up three flights of stairs, knock at my door, and say it’s time for dinner. Any idea how I counted the minutes for you to come upstairs? I recognized your footsteps, down to the mood you were in when you reached my door.”

“I didn’t know,” you said.

“Because you didn’t know shit.”

Who would you be if things had turned out differently? If you hadn’t gotten in, if you hadn’t spent five years together beating around the bush—would you have been braver, bolder, more brazen? Was there something about the way life moved that had put the inertia between you two, and could it have been overcome if you had been different, better or worse? It made you stare all the more at that little window. Perhaps to understand why you were staring in the first place.

“You know,” Wooseok said, “I didn’t like the food from the cafeteria much. But I liked it when you came by to get me.”

You both remembered falling asleep on the sofa in the common room the night you stayed up memorizing the choreography for _Love Shot_. “We woke up curled into each other,” he laughed. “I was so embarrassed and glad I got up at the crack of dawn before anyone could see.”

“A human pretzel.”

“A human pretzel.”

“Here’s what I can’t stand,” he said as you both started to leave. He was slowing his pace, as though part of him didn’t want to leave yet. You had never seen him so hesitant. “The thought that we wasted so much time. I could have done something back then. I was so scared. And I’m still scared. I’m not really running my own business or even with Minho. Sometimes I still feel like I’m still a half-baked idol waiting for a shot at the big time.”

You told him he couldn’t possibly be serious. His husband, their dog, their home, the amazing work his advertising agency had done, the creatives they had made famous—were they nothing?

“They belong to one universe. I’m talking about the other, the one we come and go from every few years. This life.”

Quantum theory would have it that like cats, you got to live nine lives. And in some lives you binged, some lives you nipped, some you guzzled, some you sipped. You wanted to tell him this revelation, but you didn’t dare. Which one is our life now? Was it just a rehearsal for the big time? No, you didn’t want to know.

On your way through the grounds back to the parking lot, you spotted a bench by the wayside. You stopped and stared. You knew he was thinking the same thing.

“Looks like the same one,” he said.

“You wanted my spit.”

He was about to pretend to have forgotten, but then, “yes, I did.”

Your real life stopped there.

  


.•º

  


“By the way. Are we sleeping in the same bed tonight?”

“I thought that was the plan,” you said.

“_The plan_,” he repeated, just shy of a barb. “Of course.”

You were sitting in what was still the best restaurant in town. This was where visiting parents took their kids who were jailed in the Produce program. Your mother had brought you here once, and so had his. “One day you’ll have dinner with your kids here,” he said. “And on that day,” you replied, “I’ll wish it were the three of us.”

Really?

“It’s the truth.”

“Wouldn’t your kid think it was weird?”

“Sure. But you wouldn’t and I wouldn’t.”

He reached out and touched your face.

“Two days,” you said.

“Two days.”

What you meant, though neither of you were going to say it, was _a whole lifetime in two days._

The meal was mediocre. But you didn’t care. You stared out the window, had dessert, skipped alcohol, and lingered. There was no tension. You suggested taking your time walking back to the tiny hotel, stopping in a newly-opened bar manned by a fetching twenty-something young man with long fingers and slicked back hair. Could have been your son, if you’d had kids.

“He’s pretty,” Wooseok said, watching your eyes.

“Pales in comparison,” you said.

The place was not full. Monday nights were never big with the drinking crowd in Paju. You sat by a window overlooking a moonlit, manmade lake. But without ordering, Wooseok changed his mind and you changed your minds and left. He wanted to walk along the frozen bank of the lake. Why not? If there was somewhere Wooseok wanted to go, you’d go. Maybe he was trying to step back in time, or delay being alone in the hotel.

But after walking along the lake and heading across the ice, you felt a surge of emotion on spotting how his back now rounded ever so slightly. You topped him, held him tight, and kissed him. You thought back to the moment when the owner of the hotel had first shown you to the bedroom. Twin beds. You smiled and nodded. You didn’t feel awkward then. But you continued to fear that you might. Now, on the lake, you couldn’t have felt more different.

Was he happy you’d both come?

He nodded. “We belong here,” he said, surveying the frozen lake.

“On ice?” you asked.

“All of this is us, you know,” he said, ignoring your comment.

He was right. This was _us_. Forever trainees, forever on the cusp of debuting, unborn. The other _us_ was in Seoul. You and Joo were watching TV. Wooseok and his husband were doing whatever they were doing. Playing mahjong, for all you knew.

This was your moment. All that you’d done over the years was to rehearse it, sensing now that it had waited no less faithfully than Hachiko had waited for his master at Shinjuku station. You were like people who returned to their ancestral homeland to find that the old keys to the manse still worked and that the rooms bore the scent of your great-grandparents. Time hadn’t touched anything.

So you told Wooseok about Lee Dongwook.

Toward the end of the X1 contract run you had bumped into him at the mall, having just finished coffee with the director of a new TV series. He was married now and had a second child along the way. You had both ended up walking around the area, dipping in and out of shops. Out of curiosity, you walked down a narrow lane and was surprised to find an old tailor shop still open for business. The shop had been completely revamped and the salesclerk he’d known there was long gone. When Lee Dongwook told the new clerk that this was where he had his suits made decades before, when he had just stated his career, the young man took his name down and disappeared downstairs. Five minutes later, the salesclerk came back upstairs with a pair of slacks and a suit still hung up, stitched inside out, measuring tape dangling from the pocket, the name _Lee Dongwook_ inscribed on the tag. “You seemed to have never come back for your second fitting,” the clerk said. “The tailor who made this was my elder brother. He left us three years ago.”

At which Lee Dongwook’s eyes grew wide, and he choked back a sob.

  


.•º

  


On the way back to the hotel, Wooseok held your hand. “I’m happy.”

From the way he said it, it sounded like a complete surprise. You needed to hear him say it, though. The tenderness in his voice made you realize. You were just two people who had never found the confidence to go far enough or know where far enough was. You stopped again and kissed. You recalled your old fantasy. You wanted him naked with you, wanted to see his bare thighs straddle you and, as he’d lean toward you with his hair in his face and you inside him, watch him pin your arms with his knees while he cracked your champagne glass with one hand and with the other cut you with a shard.

“Tomorrow can’t be it,” he said. His back tensed, and he shook it off, then tensed again. Nearing your hotel, you could sense that he was reluctant to stop walking. What made _you_ nervous was that you weren’t nervous at all. You had started wanting him at the lake and didn’t want to lose that impulse. You liked the idea of the glass, the bare knees, of his mean, bruise-colored lips smiling as he cut you. Would he remember _you, of any man I’ve ever known? _Would he ride you and then beg you to look into his eyes when you came together?

“The truth is,” Wooseok’s voice was tight, “I’m out of practice.”

You were sitting on the same side of the bed with your clothes on. He was playing with the cuff of his shirt that was sticking out under the sleeve of his cardigan, which he gave no signs of wanting to remove.

“Out of practice how?” you asked gently.

He shrugged. “Minho and I don’t sleep together. Well, we sleep together, but not really—you know... not that it...”

“Nothing?”

“Sometimes, but not really.”

He lifted his face and looked at you. “Plus, I’m not sure I’ll do it for you anymore.”

You couldn’t help reaching out and holding his head between your hands and kissing it again and again. You wanted to hold him, and to hold him naked, and asked for nothing more. You wanted to hug him in bed, to kiss him, kiss him again and again, until either you made love or fell asleep. He said nothing. Then, out of the blue, “I feel like an amateur. A virgin. And with you, of all people.”

“If you’re a virgin, then what am I?” you said, to show he wasn’t alone in his unease.

“We’re both wounded beasts,” he laughed.

“I’m more wounded,” you said, in an attempt to make him feel better, and stood up to turn off the lights and pull open the blinds to get a better view of the view. It had snowed a few days ago and there was whiteness everywhere, draped cozily over the rooftops and covering the fields. There was the lake, a mile away. Then the Starbucks that had replaced the corner shop, the bar where you’d almost ordered two whiskies before walking out, and further away, the dorms and the Studio and the roundabout. Lights still glowed in the studio as if training were in session, as if you were about to go to dinner after dance practice, always becoming tentative as you reached your dorms, which is why you slowed your pace as you’d cross the courtyard, stopping to soak in the change from winter to spring and then summer.

“Come and take a look,” you said. He joined you next to the window. Staring out at the moonlit expanse of the snow-spotted landscape, he said _oh, oh, oh_. You wrapped your arms around him and stood stationary this way until he put his arm around your wait. As you held him closer, you wanted to feel his skin and so you unbuttoned your shirt. He did not help you, nor did he seem eager to unbutton his.

You removed your shirt and was about to help him undress. “Just help me forget I’m nervous,” he said. “Look at me. Look at this,” he held up his hands, which were trembling. “I’m shaking all over.”

You were not sleepy afterward.

You almost laughed when you realized that neither of you had completely undressed. “It’s been ages since I’ve touched a man,” you said.

“When _was_ the last time?” he asked as he came out of the bathroom, typing a bathrobe.

“Zico, I think.”

“_Zico?_” he exclaimed, totally bewildered. “What in the world?”

“It just happened. Late night in the studio, too much to drink...”

“Thank you for sparing me the details,” Wooseok groaned.

You sat down naked on the undone bed, picking up your sweater from the floor, and slipped it back on. Wooseok came back with makgoelli from the minibar and two plastic cups, sitting cross-legged across from you on the bed. You crossed your legs too. You loved that you were like this, partly naked.

“So let me ask you this,” he said, as though you were still deliberating the question. It thrilled you, because you knew he’d been mulling this over and had anticipated your answer long before asking. Part of you felt arousal course through your body. How you loved this. He wanted the truth from you, and with the truth came arousal. You clinked your wobbly plastic cup against his and downed the milky stuff.

“What?”

“Why didn’t you make love to me that night? The night we came back from your mother’s.”

You knew it.

“Was there someone else? Or was it the timing?”

“No,” you said. “It was always you. And of course I wanted you. You know that. And I told you I loved you the next morning.”

“That you did,” Wooseok said, lips lurking, remembering.

“And the number of times I got hard just thinking about you. You have no idea how much I wanted you. But I’d become so nervous that the closer we became, the harder it was to tell you anything. But the truth is,” and here you stopped a second, “there was something.”

”_Something?_” Wooseok wasn’t going to make it easy for you, was he?

“You’d gone cold in the car. I thought something was going to happen. I wanted you so bad. I kept that on the drive all the way back. But I didn’t know if I could turn to you because I didn’t know if you really wanted to—wanted me.”

He said nothing. You decided to take it a step further.

“It was Hangyul. He was there. He thought I was going to be later, he was watching something on his phone when I walked back in. I was already past gone that night, especially after kissing you for so long. Part of me wanted to just head to your room and pick up where we had left off. Maybe I should have done that. But I also knew what I wanted: I wanted something hot, I wanted it quick, I wanted it clear, strong, and dirty. Hangyul—he and I didn’t have to say anything. We just fell into it, almost by accident. His phone was still on, sounds from whatever porno he was watching and the light from that the only light in the room. We lurched and leaned into each other. Before we knew it, his hand was on my belt and I’d already taken off his pants. No shame, no guilt, it happened so fast that nothing felt easier or more natural. Unlike you and me. There was no hesitation, no deferral, no thinking. And all he said afterwards was, _want some?_ and handed me his water bottle. Like we’d just finished working out. I wanted you even more after him than I did earlier that day. I wanted to tell you what I’d done. I wanted to share the secret with you and then ask what you thought. Hell, I was even happy. After the holidays he was back and so was I. We were working furiously on the choreography for the new song, remember that? Eventually, I’d say I needed to take a breather, and I’d go back to my room. When Hangyul was there we’d get each other off. Knowing you were there waiting in the living room for me downstairs turned me on. Every time I finished with him I’d think, okay, that was the last time. But I knew that sleeping with you wouldn’t resolve anything about us—and the last thing I wanted was to wake up in the same bed with you, things unresolved between us. So I was like an ellipse. Two foci, no center, back and forth.”

Silence.

“And now you know,” you finally said.

“Know what? That you had a sex drive bigger than your head? Everyone knew you’d sleep with anything that moved.”

You had expected him to snap back with something like, _nice work! All those weeks and months that I had your heart, your cock belonged to someone else._ But Wooseok wasn’t so petty.

“So I was—what? A front for fanservice?”

“Maybe that’s how it started, but—you know I loved you. Love you still. Nothing made me happier than to see you working, to be working together.”

But still you were still hiding something from him. And you knew he knew it. Yes, in those days Wooseok was a sure way of keeping the pilot light of desire burning all day, the catalyst that drove your performances from 100% to 150%, that kindled you all day in front of the cameras before it caught fire later every night in your bedroom. If you did not think of Wooseok during the day, it was just to starve before feasting. On the nights that you didn’t plan together or work together or had separate schedules, you’d not only rush home to meet Hangyul in bed but less than an hour later head out with your friends and go home with whomever was willing that night, and it didn’t matter who. Hangyul and the others you slept with didn’t blunt your desire for Wooseok but stoked it and made you want him even more. But that was its own fuel and it made you the performer you were and powerful, unstoppable, fierce on stage. Of course there was a part of you that was afraid. That by consummating your desire for him, you’d be throwing water over the very fire that gave you life. Ceding your life force and calling it quits.

But that reasoning was as much a mask as anything else. In the end, and without ever admitting it to yourself, you’d grown to love serving two masters—perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one. The energy you got was from catapulting from one to the other and back again, round and round.

“Did you think of Hangyul when we stopped by the dorms tonight?” Of course he had to ask.

“Yes,” you said. Then you told him, “I like telling you the truth. It turns me on.”

“I can see _that_.”

You had thought it was the memory of those nights in the dorms was what was exciting you now. But no, it was confession, and within each revelation something indecent—that thrilled and stirred you and made you hard again.

“Stay with me, and don’t let go,” he said, reaching for you.

  


.•º

  


Outside, it had begun snowing, and again you wondered if you would be able to change anything. Did you have it back then? Did you have it now? Had being runaways for two puny weekdays put you in the army of the brave? Or had your love been punctuated by so many regrets that you couldn’t conceive of life without them? You had never taken thing to the next step. You didn’t even know what the next step was.

Snow. As ever the silent snow. Hemmed you in, lifted your spirits, let you skate and glide and drift and yet was meaningless ashen powder. What was fantasy if not the same stuff?

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Wooseok said. “Why didn’t you make love to me that night?”

He wasn’t going to let this slide.

“Because I was scared of you. Because I wanted to make love to you but thought you wanted it perfect and I didn't want to let you down. Because I wanted you forever, and I knew you’d laugh at me if I told you. I was quick and easy but quick and easy was the last thing I wanted with you. So I waited. Then I got used to waiting. Eventually, waiting was more real than what we had.”

“Are you happy, though?”

“Yes, very.”

“Same here. The peak of life?” he asked, lips tilted up. And before you could respond, he said something I’d never have expected: “I think you’ll go back to Joo. I think that’s what you want. It’s who you are.”

“You think so?”

“I think so. Well, with you, who’s really to know? For all we’ve done tonight, all we’ve ever felt, I know one thing: you want me, but I don’t think you’ve ever craved me in your gut. You want something from me, but you don’t know what it is. Maybe all I am is an idea with a body. There was always something missing. Your hell—mine too—is that even when you’re with Joo, you’ll want to be with me again. We just don’t love normally.” He touched your face, your forehead. “I could tell you to be happy that you have her, but it won’t help. I could tell you to be happy that we’ve got two days, but that won’t help either. You’re alone, I’m alone, and the worst thing is that finding each other and saying _let us be alone together_ doesn’t solve a single thing.”

You loved him more than ever now.

“You know me so well,” you whispered, not trusting yourself not to cry.

“Because you and I are one and the same person. Everything I said about you is true about me. In a month from now, but not now, we’ll wake up and realize this was the best that life had to offer.”

You looked out at the view and the roundabout and imagined the statue of Aphrodite erupting from the ocean. Out in Paju you could see the stars.

“What else are you thinking?” he asked.

“I was thinking that Lee Dongwook probably stood by a window like this and looked out too, whenever he came in for filming. He had once been in love with a young tailor in Seoul but never had the courage to follow up on the hints and passes the tailor kept making. He’d been going to the shop for months, ordering pair after pair of pants and jackets and suits, getting all worked up whenever the tailor measured his inseam or, as it happened once, held his hand while taking the length of his arm. But the whole thing never went anywhere. It never went away, either. It just sat there, with no future and no past. I don’t want to end up like him—who comes back to realize he’s led the wrong life after all these years.”

Wooseok hummed in interest. “When did he tell you all this?”

You looked at Wooseok, and without hesitating, said, “when I bumped into him that day at the mall, right before the end of our contracts. After we visited the tailor he invited me to his home. His wife was away visiting her parents with the children, and we were sitting downstairs drinking whiskey. We had just finished washing and drying the dishes. He was sitting next to me on the sofa and I could tell something was bothering him. But I didn’t want to guess what it was. ’Do you believe in fate?’ he asked. ‘Am I talking to Lee Dongwook, or the Goblin?’ I joked, almost sassy, to show I knew what was going on. I was trying to put him on the spot. ‘Are we still talking film? Is that it?’ ‘We could, if you want,’ he replied, as evasive and polite as ever. Then, and I have no idea why, I reached over to him and held his hand. Maybe because I wanted to make the next thing I said easier. The whiskey helped. I told him, ‘I think you should sleep with me.’ ‘What an idea,’ he said, startled and yet as placid as the moon, ‘and when?’ He was playing it cool, in his usual way. ‘Tonight,’ I said. I didn’t want to let him off the hook. I’d never been so certain. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. He was trying to give me an excuse to beg off. I wanted to reassure him. ‘Yes, tonight. I’ll take care of everything, I promise.’ And a dead silence fell between us. I still remember repeating _I promise_. He reached over to me and held my face with both his hands and brought it close to his. ‘I never thought this could ever happen between us.’ It was almost an admission. If he meant it as in he had been thinking about this from the moment he met me, I could have interpreted it that way. That was what I thought it meant, then. But in retrospect, it was an open-ended admission. ‘Changed your mind?’ he asked, putting a smile on his face. ‘Not at all,’ I said, more scared than I thought I’d be, because I suddenly realized that, despite all the sex I’d ever known, I had never made love to a—a _gentleman_ before, and that this was what he was, and that was what he was offering. When I led him upstairs to his room, he didn’t enter right away. I thought he was nervous, but now I see he was giving me a way out if I still wanted it. I didn’t turn on the lights and began taking off my sweater. But he was naked before I was. It was he who took me in his arms and started to undress me. I lost track of what we were doing. I was more nervous than he was. And he ended up taking care of me.

Early next morning I got up to leave. He’d put a note in my shoe. _You were sent to me. Yours, Dongwook. _It might have been the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me.

A few days later he came around to the dorms. Do you remember? They were filming a wrap-up special to commemorate the end of our contract. He could barely look at me. Before he left, he caught me on the way out. I could tell he had something to say to me so I said I’d walk him down. “Thank you,” he said, handing me a small wrapped package right before we got the elevator. I opened it on the spot. It was a beautiful pen with this navy ceramic exterior and brass detailing. Really classic. “I have one just like it. I wanted you to have the same one.”

“So that’s where it came from,” Wooseok said.

  


.•º

  


That night, wrapped tight together in one thick down comforter, you both looked out at the town, the glittering lights shuttering off one by one. For a moment you thought that all the ways they understood you were no different than the multiple unborn, unfinished lives you had, waiting at the door to be let into reality.

“Why did we wait so long?”

You didn’t know the answer. “Maybe what we have hasn’t been invented yet.”

“Maybe because it doesn’t exist.”

“Which is why I hate how this might end.”

“Good night,” Wooseok said, turning his back to you, while you wrapped your arms around him.

Silence.

“I know one thing, though,” he murmured, without turning around.

“What?”

“This doesn’t end, whatever happens. Never, ever ends. Seungyoun—our love may not live, but it’ll never die. And it’ll be the last thing we take with us, when the time comes.”

You tightened your arms around him. “When the time comes,” you echoed.

_. • º_  
fin   
_º . •_

**Author's Note:**

> Ever since I first read _Call Me By Your Name_, I’ve wanted to emulate Aciman’s high-fidelity take on love, infatuation, and relationships. Adapting his short story into the X1 world is a quick and dirty way of doing it, but _Star Love_ was basically begging for a Seungseok edit. After writing this for myself and my own pleasure, I thought I’d edit it a bit more and share it out to the community. 
> 
> If you liked this fic, please do check out Aciman’s book of short stories, _Enigma Variations_, or his novel _Call Me By Your Name_ (which is also an award-winning movie)! You won’t be disappointed.


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